* This statement was published on 29th November 2022 to mark the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. If you would like to add your signature please do so at this link.
We as TWAIL (Third World approaches to international law) scholars and allies affirm our commitment to Palestinian freedom and our solidarity with Palestinians collectively struggling towards liberation. We, the signatories to this statement, unequivocally support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, including the academic boycott as the most direct and relevant expression of our solidarity.
The global south has a long history of engagement with the ‘Question of Palestine’, understanding it as an anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggle. Palestine has been central to the Third World agenda and inextricable from similar liberation movements across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. While this engagement has not always been unified, at pivotal moments at the United Nations, in the Non-Aligned Movement and in the Tri-Continental conferences, the peoples of the global south have come together to support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and protested Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands, discrimination against Palestinian citizens, violence against Palestinian people, and the denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.
We have valued the intellectual and political diversity of the TWAIL community, just as we have valued the TWAIL community’s shared commitment to decolonization, racial justice and the right to self-determination. It is in that context that, for us, support for BDS is grounded in our support for academic freedom and the right to self-determination in historic Palestine. We similarly commit to support and pursue the core aims of the Palestine & Praxis statement, including by actively supporting Palestinian scholarship, as well as pressuring our own academic institutions and organizations to respect the Palestinian call for BDS and to remove any complicity or partnership with military, academic and legal institutions involved in entrenching or whitewashing Israel’s policies.
Israeli academic institutions are implicated in Israel’s worst forms of violence, including weapons technologies and military ethics that have facilitated the killing of great numbers of Palestinians. Israeli universities in 1948 Palestine are inaccessible to Palestinian students and scholars in the 1967 occupied territories because of movement restrictions denying them access to their own archives as well as educational opportunities, while Israeli universities inside the occupied territories are an integral part of settler colonial expansion and the displacement and dispossession of Palestinian communities. Israeli authorities have denied students and scholars the ability to travel abroad for conferences; the Israeli military has systematically attacked students on Palestinian university campuses, and most recently, have instituted a policy that makes international study or work at a Palestinian university contingent on military approval.
BDS is a Palestinian-led movement ‘for freedom, justice and equality’. The academic boycott is a central dimension of BDS and of critical relevance to TWAIL scholars invested in academic freedom for Palestinian students, researchers and faculty. BDS is inspired by the pivotal role that the boycott movement played in third world solidarity with South Africans resisting apartheid. The boycott will not end Israeli apartheid or settler colonialism by itself; however, it interrupts its normalization, including our own complicity with these systems of oppression. BDS is also a way to publicly express support for those struggling against injustice in Palestine – a struggle that is often a lonely and isolating one for Palestinians because collusion between Israeli colonialism, American empire and anti-Palestinian racism has worked to deter open criticism of Israel.
In that light, in response to the clear and simple request from our Palestinian colleagues for an institutional academic boycott of Israel and in line with the guidelines they have set out, we pledge not to engage in any professional engagement with Israeli academic, research, or state institutions until Israel ends its regimes of occupation, colonialism and apartheid over Palestinian lands and people, and respects the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. This does not apply to individual scholars acting in their individual capacity, as is well-known and made clear in the Palestinian guidelines. For us, our support for BDS is an expression of our ethical commitment as TWAIL scholars. We echo the message from Palestine & Praxis that ‘scholarship without action normalizes the status quo and reinforces Israel’s impunity’, and we call on fellow international law scholars across the world to respect the academic boycott and the BDS movement’s goals for freedom, justice and equality.
Signatories:
M. Sornarajah
Richard Falk
Duncan Kennedy
Vasuki Nesiah
Mazen Masri
Noura Erakat
Ntina Tzouvala
Sujith Xavier
John Reynolds
Usha Natarajan
Vidya Kumar
Robert Knox
Christopher Gevers
Darryl Li
Nimer Sultany
Markus Gunneflo
Mai Taha
Ata Hindi
Gabriel Mantelli
Nicola Perugini
Cecilia Bailliet
Irina Ceric
Grietje Baars
Renisa Mawani
Parvathi Menon
Nada Moumtaz
Helyeh Doutaghi
Tanzil Chowdhury
Claiton Fyock
Claire Mumme
Brendan Ciarán Browne
Mohsen al Attar
Faisal Bhabha
Emily Jones
Lori Allen
Simon Behrman
Vanja Hamzić
Thamil Ananthavinayagan
Bana Abu Zuluf
Ardi Imseis
Nicolás M. Perrone
Adrian Smith
Bill Bowring
Mohammad Shahabuddin
Bill V. Mullen
Rose Parfitt
Terri Ginsberg
Gustavo Gozzi
Laleh Khalili
Tomaso Ferrando
Dorothy Mazaka-Goede
Devanshi Saxena
Fabia Fernandes Carvalho
Sarah Katz-Lavigne
Tor Krever
Cynthia Franklin
Michael Letwin
Brenna Bhandar
Maria Elander
Mostafa Naser
Sara Dehm
Sara Ghebremusse
Julia Dehm
Ayça Çubukçu
Dila Novita
Souheir Edelbi
Rohini Sen
Syeda Re’em Hussain
Mohd Imran
Shraddha Dubey
Abdullah Nasir
Gert Van Hecken
Oishik Sircar
Shaimaa Abdelkarim
Solange Mouthaan
Shahd Hammouri
Edel Hughes
Haris Jamil
Yvette Russell
Sumedha Choudhury
Jay Ramasubramanyam
Nivedita Saksena
Farzan Dar
Vincent Bellinkx
Henry Jones
Aman
Rosie Woodhouse
Anthony Cullen
Tarcísio Diniz Magalhães
Orla Kelleher
Lisa Hajjar
Kathleen Cavanaugh
Fia Hamid-Walker
Jean-Marc Louvin
Sahiba Maqbool
Daniel Segal
Michelle Farrell
Christine Schwöbel-Patel
Michelle Burgis-Kasthala
Lana Tatour
Luigi Daniele
Richard Clements
Amar Bhatia
Laura Betancur-Restrepo
Amaka Vanni
Jeanne M. Woods
Anirudha Choudhury
Ikechi Mgbeoji
Kanad Bagchi
Rudrani Banerjee
Ellen Dichner
Tim Lindgren
David Letwin
John King
Romain Chuffart
Josh Bowsher
Liz Elkind
Raghavi Viswanath
Richard Joyce
Drew Curtis
Priya Anuragini
Tamsin Paige
Matthew Zagor
Sean Madden
Stephen Young
Alessandra Spadaro
Marina Velickovic
Goldie Osuri
Santosh Anand
Hüseyin Dişli
Gobinda Aryal
Brian Ford
Noam Peleg
James Godfrey
May Bratby
Nicola Soekoe
Tanaya Thakur
Claire Debucqois
Farnush Ghadery
Tariq Modood
Anil Yilmaz
Vasanthi Venkatesh
Maja Janmyr
Mohammad Nasar Nasir
Michael Fakhri
Faizan Ahmad
Alreem Kamal
Saif Quadri
Misbah Ahmad
Nour Hashem
Abdelwahab Alenezi
Rene Alvarez
Nesreen Hamdan
Fedah Atshan
Melissa Hendrickse
Melyssa Haffaf
Jennifer Selwyn
Yara Fadel
Sara Poursafar
Karen Pearlston
Yara Issa
Sheida Ahmed
Christy Fujio
Kristin Nelson
Abhijeet Shrivastava
Jay Zhou
Salomeh Ghorban
Natalie Nelson
Teresa Marmolejo
Arianna “Afeni” Evans
Maisa Ferreira
Nicole Dillard
Paula Chakravartty
Jessica Salah Wesley
Abdi Jama
Madison Mustafa
Dina Zakaria
Yasaman Soofi
Jeanin Abraham
Suhair Shawar
Shannon Kamikubo
Muhammed Karayagli
Amy Strecker
Anastasiya Kotova
Sonia Widya
Surabhi Ranganathan
Reeju Ray
Daniel Stein
Patrick Timmer